When Dale Chihuly signed up for his first class at the University of Wisconsin's fledgling studio glass program in 1966, most of the very few people who cared about the medium looked to Europe.

No one knew then how the popularity of American glass would explode to draw record-breaking crowds today, or that Chihuly — despite losing the use of an eye and arm in the late 1970s — would become an internationally celebrated pioneer in the vanguard of a revolutionary movement.

Nearly 50 years after taking up the gaffer's blowpipe for that first time, however, the Seattle-based artist has grown into a global icon whose resume ranges from spectacular landscape-sized shows in Venice and Jerusalem to flashy retail outlets in Las Vegas.

So provocative and commanding are his creations — which include relatively small blown-glass vessels as well as giant, multi-piece sculptures that transform the surrounding environment — that three American museums have staged major exhibits over the past four years, with the newest and biggest debuting Oct. 21 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

Since the opening crowd of 6,500 people, the guards and motion-activated alarms have worked overtime dealing with bedazzled admirers who simply can't resist the impulse to lean in and even touch one of Chihuly's beguiling, often otherworldly flights of color, form and imagination.

Some have been so mesmerized by the spell-binding blown-glass "Persian Ceiling" that they literally stop to lie down and look up from the floor. Others have been so moved by the artist's vibrant, dramatically illuminated works that — echoing a response seen in other venues — they halt in their tracks and start crying.

"It's like catnip," says VMFA communications director Suzanne Hall, describing a reaction that has sparked record sales in the museum's gift shop.

"People come in and they're just positively giddy. They can't get enough."

That's exactly the kind of experience that VMFA Director Alex Nyerges and deputy Robin Nicholson hoped to create when — several years before opening a massive $150 million, 165,000-square-foot addition in 2010 — they began searching for attractions that would underscore the museum's new size and ambition.

Drawn by Chihuly's unique ability to spark wide public interest as well as critical acclaim, they made their first visit to his famed Washington state studio 4 years ago, unfolding the architectural plans that would convince the artist and his 90-person team to start work on what has become their largest museum exhibit.

"He was the singular and only choice for doing the sort of show we wanted to mark the emergence of studio glass as a major art form," Nyerges says.

"And — Good Lord! — just look at the vistas he's created here! They're incredible — almost otherworldly. He's taken glass from the individual object we've traditionally seen and used it to create environments that are like walking into a dream."

Such aspirations lay far in the future when Chihuly left Wisconsin in 1967 as an unknown artist working in what most people then considered an aesthetic backwater.

Even after spending an additional year soaking in Old World techniques at the famed Murano glass factories in Venice, his early, muted and relatively monochromatic explorations of sculptural vessel forms provided scant evidence of the vivid color, flamboyant showmanship and unprecedented scale that would later make him famous.

Not until he lost an eye in a 1976 car accident — then permanently injured an arm while bodysurfing 3 years later — did the National Endowment for the Arts fellow give up the gaffer's pipe to become increasingly ambitious and influential as a glass maestro.

Drawing upon his experiences in the workshops of Venice, he began assembling and directing highly talented teams of artists in ways that produced ever bigger, more complex and more startling works. Eventually, some became so big they actually took over the spaces in which they were displayed, enveloping their happily bewildered viewers in experiences that were previously unimaginable.

"Once I stepped back, I liked the view," Chihuly said in 2006, explaining how that crucial shift enabled him to understand and then influence the making of each work from multiple points of view rather than just one.

"(I became) more choreographer than dancer, more supervisor than participant, more director than actor."

Perhaps more than any of the other major museum shows staged over the past 4 years, Nyerges says, "Chihuly at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts" gives viewers the chance to survey many of the milestone chapters in what has become an extraordinary career.

The 12,000-square-foot exhibit reaches back to his early "Navajo Blanket Series" of the mid-1970s, for example, when he began exploring textilelike decorative patterns and gravity-influenced sacklike forms in response to his passion for Native American blankets and baskets.

But instead of focusing on individual examples, the gallery known as "The Northwest Room" combines these glass creations with scores of baskets, blankets and archival photographs of Indians in a dramatically illuminated installation.

Similar approaches showcase the giant, shell-like Macchias of the early 1980s, which Chihuly's designers have transformed with pedestals of varying heights into a kind of magical forest. Then there's the swirling, tendrillike tentacles of the Fiori and the spherical Niijima Float forms of the 1990s, which have been assembled by the hundreds into two overflowing rowboats that look as though they're making their way through an inky black cosmos.

In the 62-foot-long "Laguna Torcello" completed expressly for the Richmond show, the artist and his team have not only created a lush island garden verdant with scores of oversize vegetable and floral forms but also their largest platform installation ever.

They also pushed beyond numerous technical challenges to produce the striking string of tall, vertical red-glass reeds that appears with such wonderful effect among the water lilies and other aquatic plants in the museum's outdoor reflecting pool.

"He's an impresario — and he really knows how to create things that take your breath away," Nicholson says, describing the visual impact of these installations.

"It's not just art that's on view here — it's spectacle — and that's drawing people who do not think of themselves as ever going to museums."

Erickson can be reached at merickson@dailypress.com and 757-247-4783. Find him at dailypress.com/entertainment/arts and Facebook.com/dpentertainment

Bus trips: Seats are still available on a Nov. 8 bus trip to Richmond and the VMFA being organized by the Charles H. Taylor Arts Center in Hampton. Tickets are $50 and include admission to the exhibit. Contact 757-727-1490 or http://www.HamptonArts.net

Online: Go to dailypress.com/chihuly to see a gallery of images from the show.

If there's one exhibit in Virginia you shouldn't miss this year, it may be the VMFA's 12,000-square-foot look at the internationally renowned artist who has transformed the possibilities and the impact of studio glass. This is the biggest and most recent in a recent string of major Chihuly shows...